The Porch Light At Ten Past Six

The porch light at 1140 Salt Lick Road is on when he goes by, and it has been on every morning for two years.

He runs bread. Out of the bakery at four fifteen, two groceries, a gas station, the school kitchen, back by eleven. Salt Lick comes at ten past six, six days a week, and by then it is light enough that a porch light means something.

A porch light burning at ten past six is not a light somebody left on. It is a light somebody has not turned off, because somebody in that house was up all night and is not going to bed.

He does not know them. He knows the mailbox got clipped in the spring and never got straightened. He knows there is a ramp on the side door that is newer than the house.

Two years of headlights across that yard.

And there is a second cup on his dash.

Stainless, dented on the lid, and it has been riding empty since Wendell retired in March two years ago. He ran that route with Wendell for nine years, and he still fills two out of habit every morning at four, and he still pours one out in the sink at the bakery at eleven.

He is aware of how that sounds. He has not stopped doing it.

February, cold, black ice on the bridge. He came over the rise and the light was on the way it always was.

And he pulled over.

Sat at the end of that driveway for the better part of a minute with the flashers going and the heater roaring, feeling exactly as foolish as a man feels. Then he got out with the second cup and walked up the drive and knocked on a stranger's storm door at twelve minutes past six in the morning.

Woman about seventy answered it in a cardigan with her hair not done.

He held out the cup and said, "I go by here every morning at ten past six. Figured somebody was up."

She looked at it a second. Then she took it in both hands.

She did not invite him in and he did not go in. She drank it in the doorway and he stood on the step with his hands in his coat, and for a good while neither one of them said anything, which was somehow all right.

Then she said, "He's about the same."

Which told him everything and nothing.

He said he would be by tomorrow.

And he was.

He did not do a thing that morning. He did not get sent anywhere, he did not raise anything, he did not fix one item in that house. He drove the road he already drove and handed over the cup that had been riding empty on his dash for two years.

You know that porch light.

Maybe it is not a house. Maybe it is a desk two down from yours, a name in your phone, the apartment across the landing, the man who is always in that parking lot. You go past it. And somewhere in the last couple of years you settled into the conviction that whatever God is genuinely doing, it is happening somewhere else, to people who have more to offer than you do.

Say not ye, there are yet four months

Jesus said the sentence about this while sitting on the edge of a well in a country He was only passing through.

He had just finished talking with one woman. His disciples had walked into town and come back out with lunch. And He looked past them at the road they had come in on and said this.

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.John 4:35

Say not ye, there are yet four months. That is a sentence aimed straight at waiting.

Four months is what a farmer says. It is reasonable. It is how the calendar actually works. And Jesus tells them to quit saying it, because the thing they are waiting on is already standing in front of them and going white while they discuss lunch.

You are standing in a field that is white already, and it is the one your headlights have been crossing at ten past six. John 4:35 says the fields are white already, not soon and not after something else happens, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens a man's eyes onto ground he has been driving over for two years without once seeing it.

Now look at the disciples for a second, because they matter here more than the harvest does.

They walked into that same town. They walked back out of it. They saw a market, a road, some people, and lunch. They did not see one thing wrong and they were not being lazy.

And Jesus does not scold them for it. Read it again. There is no rebuke in that verse. He simply says lift up your eyes, the way you would tell a man beside you to look up because there is something worth seeing.

You have not been failing to notice for two years, and nobody is charging you with it. Ephesians 1:18 prays that the eyes of your understanding be enlightened, which is a thing done for a person rather than by one, and the Spirit of God is the one who does it, so what changed in that truck on a February morning was never a man finally trying hard enough.

The map was made out of scraps

In a shoe shop in Northamptonshire, a man named William Carey hung a map of the world over his bench.

He made it himself out of scraps. Bits of paper and leather, stitched and pasted, with what he knew written on it in his own hand. He mended shoes all day with that thing hanging in front of him, and when he finally said out loud what he thought God wanted done about the world, a room full of men told him to sit down.

I am telling you that because of where the map hung.

Over his bench. In the shop. Above the place he already stood, ten hours a day, with an awl in his hand.

And let me be plain about what I am not saying, because this subject attracts a bad sermon like a porch light attracts moths. I am not telling you to go anywhere, do more, give more or take on one additional thing, and I am certainly not telling you that being tired and short of money is holy. It is not. Nobody is asking you to be poorer or busier to prove anything.

You have in your hands right now the whole of what you are being sent with. Exodus 4:2 has God ask a man what is that in thine hand, and the answer was a stick he had been carrying around for forty years for entirely ordinary reasons, and it is the Holy Spirit and not the stick who does the sending.

That is the whole mechanism. God asks about the thing already in the hand.

A bread route. A dented cup you kept filling for a man who retired. Twelve minutes of daylight between the bridge and the school. A garage. A phone number. Whatever it is you already have, at the hour you already have it.

You are not short of one thing for what is in front of you. 2 Peter 1:3 says His divine power has given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, so the equipping is not pending, and the Spirit who lives in you is the down payment of it.